Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else could also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal website, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be aiming to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might run out of resources without getting actual site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all web hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be activated in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't require any coding capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some time, you can see all the sites that are protected inside the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you could easily enable the hotlink security feature, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than generating an .htaccess file yourself in the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an incredibly simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia CP. With it, you will simply need to pick the Internet site which should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can decide if the .htaccess file will be set up directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, when you would like to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as simple - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.